Instrumentation

It would make a fabulous SEM because of its field emission electron source, but of course has rather limited stage movement because of its main mission which is x-ray analysis. To that end, it has five WDS spectrometers, all with large area crystals. It also has a Thermo Noran System 7 SDD-EDS system. Control is through JEOL, Probe for EPMA, or Thermo-NSS software depending on the need. Finally, it has a cathodoluminescence (CL) detector which can accommodate a variety of filters for specific wavelength detection.

Acquisition of the instrument was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1126898. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Contact Ken Severin for details.

The FEI Quanta200 can be operated in regular high-vacuum, low-vacuum and full environmental ESEM modes for imaging many varieties of samples. Low-vacuum mode allows samples to be imaged that are uncoated. ESEM mode can image wet, uncoated samples and samples can be heated or cooled with a Peltier stage. The Quanta200 is equipped with iXRF software/hardware and an e2v SSD EDS detector which can measure >300,000 x-ray counts/second. Contact Ken Severin for details.

Our Agilent 7500ce ICPMS can do elemental analysis of liquids on the parts per trillion scale. Introduction systems include an Agilent 1100 liquid chromatography (LC) system for speciation studies and a New Wave UP213 laser ablation (LA) system for the analysis of solids. Our PostNova AF2000 Field Flow Fractionation (FFF) instrument may also be coupled to the ICP-MS to examine size fractions and metals.

Asymmetric FFF is a mechanical separation technique used to separate particles by their hydrodynamic size in the 1nm to 10 micron range. The PostNova AF2000 can be run as a standalone instrument or it can be coupled to the ICP-MS to examine the relationship between size fractions and metals. The technique by itself is versatile, in addition to colloids, Asymmetric FFF can be used to characterize and separate proteins, synthetic nanoparticles, pharmaceuticals, antibodies, biomolecules, vaccines and the like. Size fractions can be collected and further analyzed with other analytical techniques such as SEM, TEM, AFM and/or NMR.

Our PANalytical X'Pert MRD Material Research Diffractometer (MRD) x-ray diffractometer has many options and can be used for conventional and high resolution/quantitative powder x-ray diffraction, surface and thin film diffraction, and texture analysis. Contact Tom Trainor for details.